I heard another interesting point on one of the news channels: If you try to lump all these people into one general category of Islamic terrorists as if all of them are little soldiers following an ideology, you then ignore the actual factors that result in these lone wolf incidents.
Take these 4 incidents:
The Bakersfield couple - probably the most like the stereotype of a sleeper cell. Still the idiot attacked his workplace where he reportedly had an ongoing run-in with a Jewish coworker.
The Orlando shooting - this was a nut with an issue with gays, his father was a nut, not exactly a sleeper cell scenario.
The NY and NJ bomber - this guy has issues all over the place with the neighbors, authorities, his father, his wife and his bombs and actions were more amateurish than those of a dedicated soldier of Islam.
The stabber in MN - it's not yet clear. Reports are he was happy, he was acting strange, there is new racial tension in the area, especially with the current election. There are other young men in the community that went to become jihadists. He was 22. Schizophrenia, depression, religious warrior, who knows at this point.
The bottom line: if you treat all these cases as one homogenous terrorist thing, you will be very ineffective at intervening in the next one. Yes, they are no doubt being influenced by the social media, ISIS et al propaganda. But at the same time there may be few similarities beyond that.
I think you meant to say "San Bernardino" instead of "Bakersfield"?
Yes, I agree. And it's very, very hard for police and intelligence services to find these guys and intervene before they go haywire. For one thing, they haven't done anything wrong yet, and for another, there's easy access to guns in the USA.
As far as the mentally troubled, well, it's only a democratization of violence. You already had mentally troubled who happened to be Christian (or Jewish, or atheist, or whatever) who went on a shooting spree. Now you also have mentally troubled who happen to be Muslim. More likely, you had them all along but the press wasn't interested in their religion because it wasn't yet an issue.
And as far as the ideologically motivated, you already had the militia-types and the white supremacists and the like - who are, in fact, organized. Not much news under the sun when you also have Islamist motivated terrorists.
Sorry if that sounds harsh, but these incidents don't sound to me like more than noise on the level of violence that is present in the USA. (no please, no gun debates!)
The upside is that a lone wolf can only do a limited amount of damage, while an organized group can do exponentially more damage through planning. There hasn't been, AFAIK, an organized terrorist attack in the USA since 9/11 - and that one wasn't home-grown, but perpetrated by foreigners. So either there simply aren't home-grown Islamist cells in the USA, or the FBI and other three-letter-agencies are doing a fine job of monitoring them and nipping them in the bud.
